cron in sunos 4.0

[Steve Simmons]

arnold at emoryu2.cc.emory.edu (Arnold D. Robbins) writes:
>Is there anyone else out there who is sick of getting umpteen messages a
>day from cron?  Is there any way to shut the d*mn program up?

Walking very gently, without intending to flame...

My experience with the new cron seems to be radically different from
yours.  The new cron generates error messages back to the user when errors
occur, rather than simply pitching them or having the cron process
silently fail.  Yes, when we converted to 4.0 I got beaucoup (or however
you spell it) messages, but every single one was an indicator of an error
I'd not previously been picking up.

Sure, some of them were trivial.  But all of them were messages that would
have been printed in an interactive run.  Since cron is (for me) primarily
a system administrative tool, I considered it quite important that those
error messages be reported, not trashed.

It didn't take long at all to go thru my cron scripts and fix things up.
In fact, it uncovered a fair number of latent and not-so-latent bugs in
the scripts.  In addition, whenever something changed in the system that
broke the cron scripts I found out immediately -- not six months later
when log files overflowed or accounts weren't purged.

Don't like the performance?  Fix the scripts, or trap stderr to /dev/null.
Don't flame something that's really a major improvement.

As for public software: hey, why not pick up Paul Vixies PD cron?  He just
released it for beta test.  Of course, you'll have to take out the
automatic error notification features.  But it runs on 4.3 BSD, so should
go on a Sun with little problem.

+ Steve Simmons, Inland Sea Software, Ltd.         scs at lokkur.dexter.mi.us +
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